With 8G RAM, you can build everything except libreoffice in RAM and you might just squeeze that in. It needs 6G at the moment.
You can also have /tmp in RAM, which you might as well, as its wiped on boot anyway.

A 512Mb swap will be plently - if you need more, you are doing something wrong.
You can add a swip file later if there is really the need.

/home should not inclcude your music/movies or other media stuff you want in another OS.
/home is for your users private data and personal settings.

/boot on the SSD will speed booting but only marginally. Its a personal preferance._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

With >=2G ram you should do a amd64 install.
You do not need a separate /boot partition as every recent BIOS can read the entire HDD but its harmless and may make it easier for you to follow the handbook.
For swap, choose 512Mb or 4G, depending on your need to hibernate to RAM. 4G will allow hibernate to work with your bigger RAM.
You will need a / partition of 40G. This will let you build a esktop Gentoo without flushing source files.
You might also like a /home partition. The advantage of a separate /home is that it is easy to preserve over reinstalls, should you feel the need.

So, I have Windows 7 installation currently on a single HDD with three partitions - boot, C, D. I am wondering if I will be able to squeeze enough space to make a Gentoo installation and dual boot it with W7. I can free 360GB unallocated space from D: and would like to use it for the job. Now, how do I proceed? I was thinking about the following:

Would that work? I am almost complete newbie, especially went it comes to dual boot configuration. I am not sure whether I actually need two boot partitions or not. Eventually I can completely erase D: to free even more space for partitioning, but I rather not do it if I can.

EDIT: I came up with another question, hope you don't mind. Is there a way to access files by the two OSs on the same HDD. I mean if I add a Gentoo installation now, would there be a way to access the files on my Windows installation and vice versa?

EDIT2: Everything works just fine using the layout above. Just don't set the linux boot partition as bootable and everything is fine. Also D can be accessed by the two OSs, just make sure you have the necessary packages to use ntfs file system.

So my confusion is about the so-called "root partition" -- is it /dev/sda3 or /dev/sda8 in this case?
What kind of fstab should I have with this partitioning scheme?
The fstab file lists something like "real_root" -- what is it in this case? /dev/sda8?

The problem is in my lack of the conceptual knowledge of partitioning. If we partition /dev/sda3
to accommodate /usr, /var, /home, logically it follows that /dev/sda3 is root,
so why do we need to create another partition for "/"?

You do not use real_root in /etc/fstab, thats a parameter on the kernel command line for use by the inotramfs.

root (hdx,y) is the way that grub identifies your partitions. It cannot use the kernel names at boot time as the kernel is not yet running.
The numbers x and y relate to the way that the BIOS sees your HDDs and partitions. BIOS and kernel HDD may not be the same.

root=/dev/sda8 or /dev/ram0 or whatever, tell the kernel where to find the root filesystem
The kernel cannot yet read the root filesystem (and /etc/fstab) as the root filesystem is not yet mounted.

The initramfs is only a temporary root filesystem intended to be used to do anything required to mount the real root filesystem.
root=/dev/ram0 tells the kernel to use /dev/ram0 as the root filesystem, which grub has populted by loading the initramfs into memory at the right place.
real_root=/dev/sda8 then tells the initramfs where to find the real root filesystem.

The problem with bootstrapping is that several circular dependencies must be broken to load the operating from disk, using a method stored on the same disk that you need the operating system loaded to be able to read. It all starts with the BIOS reading the MBR. Thats all the BIOS can do- read Logical Block 0 from the boot drive and jump to its start address._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

thank you for a pointer to initramfs, I've read its wiki and found out that since my root partition (/dev/sda8, that is) is a logical one,
I may need a package called sys-fa/lvm.

Now I'm starting to get it: first BIOS mounts /dev/sda1 and then looks inside grub.conf.
In grub.conf there is a string of the form "root (hdx,y)", that basically tells where "/" is.
Then the system (kernel or still BIOS?) mounts "/" and looks inside /etc/fstab to mount other partitions.
Is this correct? And if this is indeed so, then why does one need to write an entry
such as "/dev/sda8 / ..." to /etc/fstab?

So, is initramfs the only way one can mount a root partition that resides in a logical partition?
If not, how does one find out what values should be given to x and y in "(hdx,y)"?

Let me expand on my earlier answer. This is how a AMD/Intel based PC boots, using grub.

When the CPU is freed from reset, it is in 16 bit real mode and fetches its very first instruction from address 0xffff0, which is near the top of RAM.
The BIOS starts here. The BIOS does its thing, setting up the memory controllers, running th power on self test, setting up the hardware. When its done all that, it loads logical block zero from the boot drive into RAM. Some brain dead BIOSes expect to find an MSDOS partition table with one partition flagged bootable. IF its not found, they complain about No Operaing system Found.
If all is well, the BIOS jumps to the load address of LBA 0. (The master Boot Record).

The code in the MBR, normally grub stage1, contains a loader that makes BIOS calls to load grub stage 1.5 from the logical blocks following the MBR. When its done loading stage1.5, stage1 jumps to the start address of stage1.5.

Grub stage 1.5 can read exactly one filesystem type. Thats the filesystem where /boot is. The correct stage1.5 is selected when you install grub to the MBR.
Grun stage1.5 reads the /boot filesystem to find and load stage2. (look in /boot/grub).
Stage1.5 exits by jumping to stage2.

Stage2 reads grub.conf and presents you with the grub menu. It can load a splashimage and the kernel of your choice. The kernel is not yet loaded.
Once you make you choice, grub loads the kernel and optionally the initrd, from the filesystem indicated by root (hdx,y).
This is usually your /boot filesystem, but grub turns the root (hdx,y) into BIOS speak.

The kernel is loaded, the initrd, if any, is loaded and left at /dev/ram0 for the kernel to find, if you use root-/dev/ram0. The kernel command line is left in RAM for the kernel.

With the kernel and initrd loaded, stage2 jumps to to the kernel start address. Thats grub done. The kernel is in RAM, the initrd is in RAM and the kernel has control.
The kernel decompresses itself, does its own internal setup then looks at the command line to find out where its root filesystem is. Thats the root=/dev/sda8 in your case.

Provided everything needed to mount the root filesystem is build into the kernel, the kernel runs the script /sbin/init, which brings up the rest of the system. The init script starts other things to get you to the login prompt. If the kernel is missing something and you don't use an initrd to provide it, you will get a kernel panic message that ends unknown-block(x,y)
x and y are the major and minor numbers of the device the kernel tried to mount as root. They indicate what might be wrong.

The kernel does not need any help to mount root on a logical partition. I think you are confusing logical partition with logical volume when you mention lvm. The two are not related._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

The question may appear stupid, because everybody probably knows that parted can do it. However, this is no longer true with parted-3.0: Apparently the parted developers seem to think that development means removal of the main functionality of the program. Note that all other tools like gparted just use parted to do this task!

In parted-3.1 some first sanity seems to be restored: At least there is now formally a library which they claim can do a subset of the resize tasks, but no corresponding command is provided in parted and apparently also no other tool which uses this library.

So my question: If you have a system/rescue-disc with >=parted-3.0; how can you resize a DOS partition? Has Linux become such a regression that such a simple and previously solved task is factually no longer possible?

Well i'm back to linux in order to dive into programming.
I remenber 10years ago when i spend nights installing gentoo and that was kind of a nightmare to support hardware at that period. Well.

Basically i wanna go back to linux to set up a dev station (mainly c, python, network programming, web dev etc etc).
This is gonna be mainly programming (reading documentation online) and stuff but i'll may have to work with some assets (kind of 500Mo data but not frequently so not a big deal).
I'm running a computer with two sata 300 drive 200GO.

The first one have dedicated 60Go on the primary partition (/dev/sda1) for Windows 7 OS.
Currently the other Space is used by my works data (but there's a lot of free space because it's mainly text).
So i might have more than 100Go Free space on that hard drive.

The second hard drive is like storage device for music, assets, huge windows program and stuff like that.
Have lot of free space on it too but it's more full.

Hey. Sorry if this is the wrong place, but the partition help stickythread seems to be kind of dead. I've got an old G4 Powerbook that I'd like to try installing a still-supported OS on, so I have downloaded and burnt the minimal install CD for Gentoo. However, I would like to keep my old OS 10.4.11 install because I still like the feel. Problem is, I no longer have the install disks for OSX to partition my drive that way. Luckily, as I understandit, I can use

Code:

parted

to shrink my OSX partition without them.

The HD has a size of 93GB, of which 60.9 is free, and 40 of which I am willing to devote to Gentoo. While I will obviously be backing up all of my old files and the like, I would like to use parted right the first time and NOT mess my system up. I'm wondering what I would need to do to resize my OSX partition right. The handbook does not seem to be a lot of help on this point, as the parted command only seems to have an example for pegasos. GNU documentation claims the parted command has been removed! Anyway, I'm kind of lost. Any help on this would be appreciated.

Earlier on today I posted a message about an installation problem I have where I asked for help. I think the problem arises from GPT partitioning errors... I've read the manual for my architecture, i7/AMD64 as well as relevant bits on the ia64 page and am a little confused.

I have a special EFI partition of 2MB followed by a 128MB /boot partition then an 80MB swap partition (my computer has 32GB RAM) and then the / partition takes up the rest of the 1TB disk. I've given the home partition the whole of my 3TB drive.

Is there a way to resize an ext4 filesystem and its partition in a way that changes the start point? Either to expand it toward the left/front, or shrink it toward the right/back? The only thing I've been able to think of is to make a copy of the entire filesystem, repartition the disk, and then put the filesystem in a new location. But that seems to need a lot of scratch space.